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Maude: Prose and Verse
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About the author
Christina Rossetti
336 books560 followersChristina Georgina Rossetti, sister of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, wrote lyrical religious works and ballads, such as "Up-hill" (1861).
Frances Polidori Rossetti bore this most important women poet writing in nineteenth-century England to Gabriele Rossetti. Despite her fundamentally religious temperament, closer to that of her mother, this youngest member of a remarkable family of poets, artists, and critics inherited many of her artistic tendencies from her father.
Dante made seemingly quite attractive if not beautiful but somewhat idealized sketches of Christina as a teenager. In 1848, James Collinson, one of the minor pre-Raphaelite brethren, engaged her but reverted to Roman Catholicism and afterward ended the engagement.
When failing health and eyesight forced the professor into retirement in 1853, Christina and her mother started a day school, attempting to support the family, but after a year or so, gave it away. Thereafter, a recurring illness, diagnosed as sometimes angina and sometimes tuberculosis, interrupted a very retiring life that she led. From the early 1860s, she in love with Charles Cayley, but according to her brother William, refused to marry him because "she enquired into his creed and found he was not a Christian." Milk-and-water Anglicanism was not to her taste. Lona Mosk Packer argues that her poems conceal a love for the painter William Bell Scott, but there is no other evidence for this theory, and the most respected scholar of the Pre-Raphaelite movement disputes the dates on which Packer thinks some of the more revealing poems were written.
All three Rossetti women, at first devout members of the evangelical branch of the Church of England, were drawn toward the Tractarians in the 1840s. They nevertheless retained their evangelical seriousness: Maria eventually became an Anglican nun, and Christina's religious scruples remind one of Dorothea Brooke in George Eliot's Middlemarch : as Eliot's heroine looked forward to giving up riding because she enjoyed it so much, so Christina gave up chess because she found she enjoyed winning; pasted paper strips over the antireligious parts of Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon (which allowed her to enjoy the poem very much); objected to nudity in painting, especially if the artist was a woman; and refused even to go see Wagner's Parsifal, because it celebrated a pagan mythology.
After rejecting Cayley in 1866, according one biographer, Christina (like many Victorian spinsters) lived vicariously in the lives of other people. Although pretty much a stay-at-home, her circle included her brothers' friends, like Whistler, Swinburne, F.M. Brown, and Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll). She continued to write and in the 1870s to work for the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. She was troubled physically by neuralgia and emotionally by Dante's breakdown in 1872. The last 12 years of her life, after his death in 1882, were quiet ones. She died of cancer.
Frances Polidori Rossetti bore this most important women poet writing in nineteenth-century England to Gabriele Rossetti. Despite her fundamentally religious temperament, closer to that of her mother, this youngest member of a remarkable family of poets, artists, and critics inherited many of her artistic tendencies from her father.
Dante made seemingly quite attractive if not beautiful but somewhat idealized sketches of Christina as a teenager. In 1848, James Collinson, one of the minor pre-Raphaelite brethren, engaged her but reverted to Roman Catholicism and afterward ended the engagement.
When failing health and eyesight forced the professor into retirement in 1853, Christina and her mother started a day school, attempting to support the family, but after a year or so, gave it away. Thereafter, a recurring illness, diagnosed as sometimes angina and sometimes tuberculosis, interrupted a very retiring life that she led. From the early 1860s, she in love with Charles Cayley, but according to her brother William, refused to marry him because "she enquired into his creed and found he was not a Christian." Milk-and-water Anglicanism was not to her taste. Lona Mosk Packer argues that her poems conceal a love for the painter William Bell Scott, but there is no other evidence for this theory, and the most respected scholar of the Pre-Raphaelite movement disputes the dates on which Packer thinks some of the more revealing poems were written.
All three Rossetti women, at first devout members of the evangelical branch of the Church of England, were drawn toward the Tractarians in the 1840s. They nevertheless retained their evangelical seriousness: Maria eventually became an Anglican nun, and Christina's religious scruples remind one of Dorothea Brooke in George Eliot's Middlemarch : as Eliot's heroine looked forward to giving up riding because she enjoyed it so much, so Christina gave up chess because she found she enjoyed winning; pasted paper strips over the antireligious parts of Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon (which allowed her to enjoy the poem very much); objected to nudity in painting, especially if the artist was a woman; and refused even to go see Wagner's Parsifal, because it celebrated a pagan mythology.
After rejecting Cayley in 1866, according one biographer, Christina (like many Victorian spinsters) lived vicariously in the lives of other people. Although pretty much a stay-at-home, her circle included her brothers' friends, like Whistler, Swinburne, F.M. Brown, and Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll). She continued to write and in the 1870s to work for the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. She was troubled physically by neuralgia and emotionally by Dante's breakdown in 1872. The last 12 years of her life, after his death in 1882, were quiet ones. She died of cancer.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
May 4, 2019
Entonces, si, por azar, piensas sobre el pasado,
di esto: pobre niña, al final se cumplió su deseo;
estéril durante su vida, y ahora en la muerte da fruto.
Para entender la importancia de esta breve novela hay que comprender que no estaba destinada a ver la luz. Christina había intentado publicarla y había fracasado. En 1897, cien años antes de nacer yo, Michael Rossetti, hermano de Christina Rossetti, decidió exhumar la tumba de su hermana, en la que yacía este libro junto a ella. Y lo publicó. Algo similar había hecho Dante Gabriel Rossetti con su mujer, Elizabeth Siddal, cuando ésta acabó con su vida. Rossetti enterró a su mujer con ciertos poemas, pero él decidió exhumar la tumba de su difunta esposa para recuperarlos cuatro años después (bajo ciertas condiciones etílicas que no hacen falta más que una mención de pasada...). Volviendo a Christina y su novela autobiografica, Maude, los expertos y el propio hermano dicen que fue escrita cuando la autora contaba con 19 años de edad. Es decir, se trata de una obra de juventud y, por lo tanto, hay que juzgarla como tal.
La novela está dividida en tres actos. Tres escenas unidas por los reencuentos entre Maude y sus primas. En Maude se combina la poesía con la narrativa tradicional y la narrativa epistolar. El libro culmina con un posfacio de Michael Rossetti explicando sus razones para rescatar del olvido esta obra.
Con esa tendencia que tienen los individuos de este siglo a convertirse en materialistas acríticos, no sé a quién recomendaría Maude. Es una novela profundamente religiosa, ingenua hasta la saciedad, con ciertos temas vetados y triste. Muy triste. No la clase de tristeza que resulta una novedad, sino esa que ya conoces de sobra y camina a tu lado, como una amiga y confidente. A través de esta novela de juventud podemos observar cómo fue una parte de la vida de la autora. Pero quiero creer que el mundo adoptaba el cariz de ciertos pasajes en los peores momentos, antes de una crisis depresiva. En cuanto a los temas vetados, me refiero claramente a la cuestión masculina. En esta novela no sale ni un hombre, parecen desterrados de toda consideración por parte de Maude. El único que se menciona es un tal señor Paulson. Me parece interesante cuanto menos este hecho, porque que el otro sexo sea un tema tabú dice mucho más de lo que la gente puede creer en un principio. .
Pero a mí Maude me ha enamorado. Me ha gustado mucho el estilo, el tono intimista, los personas y las reflexiones. No es una novela redonda, pero precisamente en ahí radica su atractivo para mí. Como creer en Dios se considera en este siglo un retroceso intelectual, supongo que esta novela está destinada a un público minoritario como yo y cuatro personas más, las cuales apoyamos el método científico sin que ello entre en conflicto con nuestra independencia intelectual y la Fe en Dios (y no por ellos nos creemos ni mejores ni superiores a nadie. Se llama ser tolerante y diverso en opiniones).
Creo que nunca leeré nada igual, pues Maude es una novela que parece escrita para una amiga, para el único disfrute de un grupo de personas que sabes que jamás te harían daño mediante bajezas morales o aireando tus intimidades.
En conclusión, voy a leer todo lo que ha escrito Christina Rossetti. Habrá comentarios sobre sus poemas e historias para rato. Me parece que tiene una voz única, que resulta desafiante involuntariamente en un siglo donde la espiritualidad se considera algo sustituible, como cambiar melones por sardinas.
di esto: pobre niña, al final se cumplió su deseo;
estéril durante su vida, y ahora en la muerte da fruto.
Para entender la importancia de esta breve novela hay que comprender que no estaba destinada a ver la luz. Christina había intentado publicarla y había fracasado. En 1897, cien años antes de nacer yo, Michael Rossetti, hermano de Christina Rossetti, decidió exhumar la tumba de su hermana, en la que yacía este libro junto a ella. Y lo publicó. Algo similar había hecho Dante Gabriel Rossetti con su mujer, Elizabeth Siddal, cuando ésta acabó con su vida. Rossetti enterró a su mujer con ciertos poemas, pero él decidió exhumar la tumba de su difunta esposa para recuperarlos cuatro años después (bajo ciertas condiciones etílicas que no hacen falta más que una mención de pasada...). Volviendo a Christina y su novela autobiografica, Maude, los expertos y el propio hermano dicen que fue escrita cuando la autora contaba con 19 años de edad. Es decir, se trata de una obra de juventud y, por lo tanto, hay que juzgarla como tal.
La novela está dividida en tres actos. Tres escenas unidas por los reencuentos entre Maude y sus primas. En Maude se combina la poesía con la narrativa tradicional y la narrativa epistolar. El libro culmina con un posfacio de Michael Rossetti explicando sus razones para rescatar del olvido esta obra.
Con esa tendencia que tienen los individuos de este siglo a convertirse en materialistas acríticos, no sé a quién recomendaría Maude. Es una novela profundamente religiosa, ingenua hasta la saciedad, con ciertos temas vetados y triste. Muy triste. No la clase de tristeza que resulta una novedad, sino esa que ya conoces de sobra y camina a tu lado, como una amiga y confidente. A través de esta novela de juventud podemos observar cómo fue una parte de la vida de la autora. Pero quiero creer que el mundo adoptaba el cariz de ciertos pasajes en los peores momentos, antes de una crisis depresiva. En cuanto a los temas vetados, me refiero claramente a la cuestión masculina. En esta novela no sale ni un hombre, parecen desterrados de toda consideración por parte de Maude. El único que se menciona es un tal señor Paulson. Me parece interesante cuanto menos este hecho, porque que el otro sexo sea un tema tabú dice mucho más de lo que la gente puede creer en un principio. .
Pero a mí Maude me ha enamorado. Me ha gustado mucho el estilo, el tono intimista, los personas y las reflexiones. No es una novela redonda, pero precisamente en ahí radica su atractivo para mí. Como creer en Dios se considera en este siglo un retroceso intelectual, supongo que esta novela está destinada a un público minoritario como yo y cuatro personas más, las cuales apoyamos el método científico sin que ello entre en conflicto con nuestra independencia intelectual y la Fe en Dios (y no por ellos nos creemos ni mejores ni superiores a nadie. Se llama ser tolerante y diverso en opiniones).
Creo que nunca leeré nada igual, pues Maude es una novela que parece escrita para una amiga, para el único disfrute de un grupo de personas que sabes que jamás te harían daño mediante bajezas morales o aireando tus intimidades.
En conclusión, voy a leer todo lo que ha escrito Christina Rossetti. Habrá comentarios sobre sus poemas e historias para rato. Me parece que tiene una voz única, que resulta desafiante involuntariamente en un siglo donde la espiritualidad se considera algo sustituible, como cambiar melones por sardinas.
February 11, 2020
Rosetti juvenalia I think. Very good for juvenalia but only really of academic interest.
January 7, 2023
Read aloud with Kate Howe’s Patreon. A very Victorian story about the coming-of-age of young Maude.
January 23, 2023
While this work itself didn’t stand out to me in either a good or bad way, the “Prefatory Note” by Rossetti’s brother is what touched me the most.
“It appears to me that my sister's main object in delineating Maude was to exhibit what she regarded as defects in her own character, and in her attitude towards her social circle and her religious obligations” (3).
“The worst harm she appears to have done is, that when she had written a good poem, she felt it to be good” (4).
“So far as my own views of right and wrong go, I cannot see that the much-reprehended Maude commits a single serious fault from title-page to finis” (5).
“It appears to me that my sister's main object in delineating Maude was to exhibit what she regarded as defects in her own character, and in her attitude towards her social circle and her religious obligations” (3).
“The worst harm she appears to have done is, that when she had written a good poem, she felt it to be good” (4).
“So far as my own views of right and wrong go, I cannot see that the much-reprehended Maude commits a single serious fault from title-page to finis” (5).
June 28, 2016
If anyone published my precocious writings, even just to present the author's personality and life story more than prose and verse, I'd roll _into my grave.
Painful and highly relatable.
Painful and highly relatable.
December 25, 2024
This poem highlights a bitter sibling rivalry that takes matters into shocking prose for the Victorian era.
April 8, 2014
She writes beautifully and if this is indeed an autobiographical books, Christina was quite a serious pensive girl!
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews